Fernão Vaz Dourado

Fernão Vaz Dourado (c. 1520 in Goa – c. 1580 in Portuguese India) was a Portuguese cartographer of the sixteenth century, belonging to the third period of the old Portuguese nautical cartography, which is characterised by the abandonment of Ptolemaic influence in the representation of the Orient and introduction of better accuracy in the depiction of lands and continents.

Most of his manuscript charts are of relatively large scale and are included in nautical atlases.

The 1571 atlas was reproduced in colour, with a reconstructed frontispiece, and, inexplicably, with the Eastern Mediterranean plate from the 1576 atlas included without any explanation, in "Atlas de Fernao Vaz Dourado : reprodcao fidelissima do exemplar do Torre do Tombo, datado de Goa, 1571", Porto: Livraria Civilizacao, 1948.

The 1568 atlas contains the first large-scale charts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Japan, later copied by many other cartographers.

His chart of the northwestern coast of Africa, displayed above is executed using the so-called "plain chart model", where observed latitudes and magnetic directions were plotted directly into the plane, with a constant scale, as if the Earth were flat.